Granulin-epithelin precursor (GEP) is a pluripotent secretory growth factor which promotes cancer progression in a number of human cancers. However, how cancer cells interact with GEP remains unknown. In this study, we aimed to identify the cell surface-binding partner of GEP on liver cancer cells. Human recombinant GEP (rGEP) was expressed and purified to homogeneity. The rGEP was shown to tri...

It is well documented that dysregulation of microRNAs is a hallmark of human cancers. Thus, this family of small non-coding regulatory molecules represents an excellent source of sensitive biomarkers. Unique microRNAs expression profiles have been associated with different types and subsets of gastrointestinal tumors including gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NETs). GEP-NETs ar...

Software reliability growth models (SRGMs) are very important for estimating and predicting software reliability. However, because the assumptions of traditional parametric SRGMs (PSRMs) are usually not consistent with the real conditions, the prediction accuracy of PSRMs are hence not very satisfying in most cases. In contrast to PSRMs, the non-parametric SRGMs (NPSRMs) which use machine learn...

Gross ecosystem productivity (GEP) in tropical forests varies both with the environment and with biotic changes in photosynthetic infrastructure, but our understanding of the relative effects of these factors across timescales is limited. Here, we used a statistical model to partition the variability of seven years of eddy covariance-derived GEP in a central Amazon evergreen forest into two mai...

Granulin-epithelin precursor (GEP) has been demonstrated to confer enhanced cancer stem-like cell properties in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cell line models in our previous studies. Here, we aimed to examine the GEP-expressing cells in relation to the stem cell related molecules and stem-like cell properties in the prospective HCC clinical cohort. GEP protein levels were significantly higher...

Gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NETs) are a large and very diverse group of neoplasms. Clinical presentation of NETs depends on the site of the primary tumor and whether the tumor is functioning (i.e., secreting peptides or neuroamines that produce symptoms). The diagnosis of GEP-NET is further complicated by symptomatic differences that occur depending on the type of secreted...

BACKGROUND Representative data on the gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine neoplasms (GEP-NENs) in Asian patients is rare, especially in China. This study aims to create a GEP-NENs profile of Chinese patients. METHODS This was a hospital-based, nation-wide, and multi-center 10-year (2001-2010) retrospective study which collected GEP-NEN patients' information in tertiary referral hospitals. A...

OBJECTIVES To investigate whether screening for malnutrition using the validated malnutrition universal screening tool (MUST) identifies specific characteristics of patients at risk, in patients with gastro-entero-pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours (GEP-NET). DESIGN Cross-sectional study. SETTING University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire NHS Trust; European Neuroendocrine Tumour Society C...

In this talk I present a parallel hybrid framework that combines gene expression programming (GEP) as the evolutionary problem­solving methodology and alternative meta­heuristics for tuning parameter values of parallel GEP runs. The implementation of our framework is based on a client­server architecture, including clients that use GEP to evolve candidate solutions for the problem in question, ...

In this paper, an improved GEP(Gene Expression Programming based on Block Strategy, BS-GEP) is proposed in consideration of the characteristics of software reliability growth models, on which a new software reliability modeling method is formed. Block strategy is the key point of BS-GEP, in which the population is divided into several blocks according to the individual fitness of each generatio...